Average Rating: 7.9/10
Reviews Counted: 64
Fresh: 63 | Rotten: 1
Candid, eye-opening footage gives viewers a close-up -- and educational -- look at the experiences of American soldiers in Iraq, a viewpoint not normally seen.
Average Rating: 8.2/10
Critic Reviews: 24
Fresh: 23 | Rotten: 1
Candid, eye-opening footage gives viewers a close-up -- and educational -- look at the experiences of American soldiers in Iraq, a viewpoint not normally seen.
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Average Rating: 3.9/5
User Ratings: 1,558
Uses footage shot by three members of the National Guard deployed in Iraq. Sergeant Steve Pink is a wisecracking carpenter who aspires to be a writer. Sergeant Zack Bazzi is a Lebanese-American college student who loves to travel and is fluent in Arabic. Specialist Mike Moriarty is a father who seeks honor and redemption. Part journal, part jokebook, part witness, the film offers a view of war rarely seen from the inside out. We learn what the soldiers are thinking every step of the way, from
Jun 2, 2006 Wide
Apr 24, 2007
SenArt Films
All Critics (67) | Top Critics (24) | Fresh (64) | Rotten (1) | DVD (3)
Arguably the most vital and eye-opening documentary yet made regarding the United States' current military entanglement.
The film is one of the most urgent and immediate nonfiction works we may ever see.
No matter what you think of the U.S. presence in Iraq, the film will disturb or startle or dismay you.
A riveting firsthand look at the conflict on the battlefield, in the barracks, and on the home front, unfiltered by any partisan prejudice.
A remarkable film, a you-are-there document that allows us to worry about the soldier who's risking his life even as we ponder the rights and wrongs of this military engagement.
The documentary camera has made repeated trips to occupied Iraq, but never to such raw and honest effect as in The War Tapes.
The direct-cinema authenticity that a soldier's eye gives to this largely street-fought war...lends The War Tapes its primary strength.
Intentionally or not, the movie locates a strain of ignorance to go along with the bravery
They expected tension; what they didn't expect was to serve out their year-long deployment as, essentially, the world's most targeted grocery store security.
The director has managed to shape real people's lives into a drama, without imposing ideological filters, and without sacrificing what makes them real.
If the in-country chaos has beginnings and endings, its effects are, as Steve Pink says, "lasting."
Gripping, boring, disturbing, amusing, enlightening and frustrating.
This is an important film, but be prepared for shocks.
A scary diary of their increasingly dehumanized daily lives (mostly spent protecting supply convoys on the dangerous highways) and the movie evokes the futile larger war around them in a series of haunting images.
What's here speaks for itself, and what it says is often surprising and deeply unsettling, regardless of one's political leanings.
Informative as most of the partisan-produced, anti-war documentaries that we've seen in the last several years have been, none match this one for its wide-ranging scope and lived-it-at-ground-zero truth.
...it would make a great double bill with the recent My Country, My Country, which looks at things from the other side.
The film succeeds because of its refreshingly low-key emotional approach and its refusal to impose character arcs or political agendas on its subjects' footage.
Universally Worthwhile -- not just as a documentary on this war. But as a documentary on this war, I think it's quite interestingly balanced.
A painfully intimate snapshot of who they are, the damage they inflict on an unseen enemy and what they endure while doing so, in all its absurd, dehumanizing and ennobling contradictions.
As raw and disturbing as it is wry and satirical, the resulting portrait is a powerfully unique film that goes beyond commenting on Operation Iraqi Freedom to become a provocative meditation on war itself.
The edited footage has an intensity and immediacy you won't find on cable news networks.
Beat novelist and World War II veteran Jack Kerouac ceaselessly typed his second book onto tele-type paper taped together in one continuous scroll, such that the final product proved to be one expansive manic sentence. Thanks to the graces of his gifted editor, that sentence became On the Road, the now-classic tome on
July 17, 2010
Super Reviewer
As you'll hear other combat veterans say, the movie 'The Hurt Locker' is about as realistic as Sesame Street. This film is the real deal. It's gritty, grim, and glaringly gory. But this isn't a Hollywood imagining. The body parts and blood you see in this film, the dead bodies covered with flies are what soldiers
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